He made a nonchalant gesture, the muscles in his throat working over a swallow. “They’re more of a help than a hindrance. The more people fear me, the more power I hold.”
“That’s terrible.”
He gave her a rakish half-smile. “I know.”
Farah added a bit of the cream-filled cornucopia to her bite of cake. The wine fed a ribbon of recklessness and she stretched her lips wide over her dessert, overflowing her mouth with a mélange of sweet decadence.
Blackwell’s unblinking eye honed in on her mouth as it struggled to contain the overload of fluffy whipped cream.
The skin around his lips whitened.
Farah searched for her napkin. Right, she’d thrown it at him, because he’d deserved it, and the ill-mannered villain never gave it back to her.
Shrugging, she swiped at the corner of her lips with a finger and lapped at the cream with her tongue.
The wine glass shattered in his grip.
A breath passed before either of them reacted. The wine spread across the gold tablecloth like plum-colored gore. Shards of glass reflected light from the candles in various dishes.
Dorian’s eye blazed with a black flame. Not with fury, but with a more complex, darker emotion. His nose flared on deep, uneven breaths, like a stallion that’d raced through the night.
“You’re bleeding!” Farah gasped as rivulets of red oozed from his clenched palm and thickened the wine stain with blood. She stood and reached for his hand, searching for a napkin to stanch the flow.
“No.” Blackwell pushed to his feet so forcefully, his chair tipped and crashed to the ground. He towered over her, yanking the wounded hand behind him, and warning her off with a dangerous glint in his eye.
She gestured toward him. “If you don’t get that seen to—”
“Do not reach for me,” he growled, both fists still clenched tight, one undoubtedly around a sharp piece of glass. “Is. That. Clear?”
“I just—”
“Never.”
The ice in his command shriveled what little warmth had bloomed between them. Inwardly, Farah shrank from him, though she thrust her chin forward. “You won’t have to worry about me making that mistake again,” she retorted.
His upper lip curled in a chilling sneer. “See that you don’t.”
“B-Blackwell!” Tallow lunged around the corner of the kitchen, looking very much like a scarecrow in footman’s garb, followed by a red-faced Murdoch. “W-we heard a-a-a-a…” At the sight of the shattered wine glass and blood, Tallow’s speech seemed to stall out indefinitely.
“We heard a crash, are ye all right?” Murdoch touched Tallow on the arm and Farah wasn’t too distressed to note the protective gesture.
“We’ve concluded our meal.” Dorian made the cold announcement as though a steady stream of blood wasn’t dripping from his fist onto the expensive carpet beneath him, and the shattered corpse of his wine glass didn’t cause the leftovers to sparkle. “See to Mrs. Mackenzie and make sure all is prepared for tomorrow.” The last of his order was given over his wide shoulder as he turned away.
“Blackwell,” Murdoch began, “let me—” One look from his employer silenced him, and then Blackwell was gone, leaving behind only shadows and blood.
* * *
Dorian’s jaw ached from clenching it. The tremble in his hands had nothing to do with the hooked needle he used to sew the fleshy pad of muscle that controlled his thumb closed, as he’d stitched more of his own wounds than he could count over the years, but he couldn’t seem to calm the shaking.
After he’d removed the piece of wine glass embedded in his muscle, blood had soaked through two makeshift bandages and dyed the water in the basin next to his bed a dark pink before he’d stanched the flow.
The fire in his blood had felt like a betrayal. The force of his need shocked him. Indeed, shock didn’t seem like a strong enough term for the pure, hot energy singeing along his skin, but he couldn’t conjure another word. Which was odd, because he’d read the dictionary and memorized all of them. And their meanings. And their synonyms, antonyms, variations, and conjugations.
“Fuck,” he swore as he jabbed the needle too deep into the muscle. Luckily, he’d been drinking with his left hand when the arousal had struck him with all the strength of a Viking’s cudgel, causing his fist to clench and the flimsy glass to explode. Stitching a wound with your dominant hand always afforded a neater scar.
If only he hadn’t so many wounds. Some that no stitch could reach deep enough to repair and so they remained open and bleeding, festering until they poisoned the body with their putrid filth.
Dorian focused on the sharp jab of the needle, the sting of the thread pulling through skin and meat. The pain provided an inadequate distraction from the lust pounding through him. It dulled the persistent ache in his loins, but didn’t eliminate it.
Nothing did.
Since the day he’d seen Farah glowing like a silver angel in the dank, gray strong room of Scotland Yard, he’d wanted her. His body, long thought immune to bindings of lust, came alive with stirrings and sensations he’d never before felt.
Dorian had learned too young that love and lust had very little to do with each other. Love was pure, selfless, kind, and consuming. It came naturally to someone like Farah. Lust, on the other hand, was tainted and selfish. It overwhelmed one’s humanity and transformed them into a dark creature full of impulse and instinct.